


Artificial

by zeldadestry



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Quadruple Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-29
Updated: 2006-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-26 10:59:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/282281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/pseuds/zeldadestry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I feel everything he did, Don. You may not like that, but it’s the truth."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Artificial

**Author's Note:**

> Totally AU. Charlie’s dead and replaced by a robot. Yup. (Krumholtz did have a robot bride in ‘Serenity’, after all.)

It feels like flesh. His fingers insist, as they move, that this is a body: Charlie’s body. It’s not, of course. It’s not Charlie’s skin, it is not Charlie, his brain knows it’s not.

“Did you know I was in love with you?” It turns its head slightly towards Don, chalk in hand, standing in front of the blackboard and so very, very still.

Don jerks his hand back at the question. “Don’t.”

“I feel everything he did, Don. You may not like that, but it’s the truth.”

“You’re a machine. You may sound like him, you may look like him, but you’re not.”

“I feel what he felt. I remember the only time you let me fuck you. It was amazing, Don, to feel that close to you. It was so good, I cried. Do you remember?”

Don sheds two tears: one for guilt and another for grief. He, who is not really Charlie - who is really Charlie, because who else could remember all this - wraps his arms around his brother. “I told you not to cry. I shouted.”

“You were afraid I was hurt.”

“Yes. I hurt you.”

“Don, no. Listen to me. I was crying because I was happy. I never thought you would let me be with you. I would feel completely alone without you.”

He knows how to shut it down. When they first showed him the blueprints, he saw. He tucked the knowledge away because he would need it; he needs it now to end this unbearable reunion. If only it could have been a clone. That he could have grown to accept, because if even one cell of it were Charlie, his Charlie, the real Charlie, then Charlie would still live. This, though, this is nothing but wires and chips and plastic. This is not real, even if it’s been given Charlie’s memories. “Are you happy now, right now?”

“Yes.”

Don’s thumb strokes the corner of its grin. “Good.” He traces its collarbone down to the hollow of its throat, lingers there.

“Is that what you want?”

Don knows Charlie wouldn’t have wanted him to live under this torture, haunted by a synthetic ghost. “Yes,” he says.

“Then I want you to do it.”

He curls his fingers around the back of its throat, presses his thumb down as hard as he can into the indentation until he feels the switch give way.  



End file.
